


Lose-Lose

by kradarua



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied Tyrell Wellick/Elliot Alderson, Self Confidence Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 10:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8886682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kradarua/pseuds/kradarua
Summary: Angela lost, again and again.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [poseidon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/poseidon/gifts).



_“Even if I’m losing. Let me lose, okay?”_

She’d left that meeting with Terry Colby with her face flushing, eyes stinging, and tail between her legs. Imposter syndrome had been an ugly beast that day and in the weeks following, and she could not so much as look at Elliot without hot anger and humiliation boiling her blood.

When Elliot finally cornered her, confused and awkward and wondering what he’d done wrong, that was what she’d told him. _Let me lose._

And so Angela lost, again and again. First she had failed to procure a raise from Gideon. After that, her faith in Ollie declined with each of his revealed transgressions; he pushed her to talk before she was ready, which led to him blurting that he had been cheating on her and had managed to put their financial information as well as the entirety of Allsafe at serious risk. (Not all losses were bad, Angela decided; her relationship with Ollie was no longer one she was interested in fighting for, and she had told him as much).

She’d gone to confront Terry Colby about his involvement in her mother’s death, and lost that too. He’d turned her away with a sneer and a curse that time, and when she tried again he met her questions first with insistence that money could fill the holes in her that needed a guilty party to blame for her mother’s death, and next with an obscene comment about her performing fellatio in exchange for information (not entirely surprising; women in technology frequently experienced varying degrees of sexism and condescension from their colleagues, both intentional and unintentional. Still, she’d never heard so explicit a statement directed at herself and couldn’t help the angry furrow of her brow). She’d been certain she’d lost once more—though at least, she awarded herself, she’d lost with a collected parting speech and no tears; an improvement over her last two wordless losses against this man—but before she had reached the end of the block, Antara had called and informed her that it had been a delayed victory.

It was invigorating, more empowering than she would have guessed, standing in front of a cowering Terry Colby. Because cowering he certainly was, despite his best efforts to swagger and shrug and sip his drink from a crystal glass as though nothing could touch him.

“What do you get out of this?” he had asked.

And when she’d pressed him about the meeting, asked him to describe the circumstances under which he and his colleagues had decided that the deaths of several people was an acceptable loss, he’d crumpled. His lazy smile had slid off his face and he’d shrunk in on himself under the admittance that he’d been enjoying a privileged life while decreeing the fate of those beneath him.

Maybe he was remorseful. Maybe he would sit down to dinner with his family, go to bed, and wake up the next morning having assured himself that he was not to blame, the way he had after the meeting in 1993. Either way, Angela would have paid large sums to lock that guilty look onto his face permanently.

 _That’s what I get out of this,_ she’d wanted to say. Although she was there to secure Terry Colby’s agreement to be a witness which, if the lawsuit went well, would benefit many, this quiet admittance of defeat was immensely gratifying for her personally.

When he’d offered her a position at E-corp she’d been insulted; it spoke poorly of the values at E-Corp that Terry Colby had found her ability to humiliate him “impressive,” and maybe that _was_ how the big business world worked but Angela wanted no part of it. Unfortunately, her loans insisted wholeheartedly that she become involved in it immediately, and so she found herself in public relations. Oh, what her mother would think.

Ballet with Darlene was a brief but welcome reprieve.

Her first few weeks at E-Corp were awkward and guilt-ridden. Angela hated herself for being there at all and was disheartened when she didn't immediately find an old computer record or, hell, even a dusty manila envelope with the words "THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE SHOULD DIE" emblazoned across the front in bright red letters. A smoking gun from 1993.

What she found instead were coworkers who brought donuts for their teams, greeted her in the hallways and told stories about their kids by the coffee machine. They were not inherently evil people, despite facilitating evils acts - running people into alarming amounts of debt and allowing ultra-privileged people to sit around complaining about shrimp cocktails while deciding the fate of others, for starters - and that bothered Angela. She wanted to hate them, hate the whole company until it burned to the ground, but no one coworker was directly responsible for E-Corp's wrongdoings, and so did not deserve her wrath.

And when she watched James Plouffe blow his own brains out on live TV, she surmised that many of her coworkers were probably just as much a victim as she was.

The first time Phillip Price met her, she was too blank to do much more than look wearily back at him. He had a kind face she supposed, but with blood still staining her shoes, it was too hard to suss out sincerity.

She snapped at the shoe salesman. She hadn’t meant to, of course; all the things he said about E-Corp were absolutely true. But when he directed the blame onto her, as if she had personally lied to him, as if she herself had shot Plouffe, as if the banks would understand if she just stopped paying her loans, she lost it. He scurried away to get her a pair of Pradas to try on.

Angela didn’t feel powerful at E-Corp. With every day she grew guiltier and hated herself a little more until she was completely blank. She missed programming. Phillip Price had given her too vague an answer when she’d asked him why she was there, and so she waited for the other shoe to drop. She repeated her self-help tapes every evening, as if what she was doing were any different than memorizing a vocabulary word without learning how to use it in a sentence. She formed the words— _I am confident, My confidence is powerful, I recognize myself as exceptional, I will follow my dreams no matter what—_ but didn’t quite believe them.

She spoke to Phillip Price about important things; PR strategy, which interview would be the best for him right now, her old boss. He spoke to her of dinner and his birthday. She declined his birthday flatly since the dinner invitation had in fact been a ploy to garner sympathy for the “ordinary men” who’d helped Terry Colby determine her mother’s fate.

Her confidence floundered wildly.

It took her longer than she preferred to admit that she was being played. E-Corp didn’t value her, and neither did Phillip Price; he’d ingratiated himself and others to her, assuming that once she replaced the faceless villains in her head with actual people, she might reconsider. When her confidence surged she addressed Price, sure she was one step ahead of him, but he shot her presumptions down and her confidence along with it.

Visiting Elliot was nice, even if he was in jail and having hallucinations to boot. Truthfully, jail was probably the safest place for him. Angela spoke to him about Qwerty and thought of happier, easier times.

Placing Darlene’s equipment to hack the F.B.I. had made Angela’s heart beat so hard she was sure everyone around her could hear it, but when it was done she relished the rush. These days she felt like a robot, moving through her life mechanically and without true purpose.

At the karaoke bar, she made the firm decision to stop giving any sort of fuck about what people might think of her. It was exhausting trying to be happy with herself and make her Dad happy with her and make Price happy with her _and_ make Darlene and Ruth and Elliot and Ollie and everyone else on the planet happy with her, and she was tired. So when her dad’s old friend came up to her and told her how he really felt about her life (as if his opinions mattered, as if he should get to have a say in how she lived or what she did with herself) and threw in an accusation of performing sexual favors to boot, she decided: fuck him. Fuck Price, fuck the F.B.I., and fuck this 60-year-old man making a living fixing other people’s toilets for just enough money to get by.

Much of the guilt lifted after that.

It did spike back up again after she spoke with Dom, however, and before she was captured she had been on her way to the F.B.I with every intention of confessing.

There were several hours with the weird little girl and the draining fish tank and strange questions until finally, a woman joined her in the room to ask her why she was so special. Angela had no answer for her; she certainly did not feel special. All her teachers from grade school onwards had encouraged her to pursue opportunities and challenges but here she was stumbling across situations while trying to piece together some semblance of motive. She shed tears and offered the woman her evidence against E-Corp and answered that she no longer believed that wanting things was enough to get things done. The woman advised her to reexamine her definition of “real,” and left her alone again. In the dark room with the dead fish, Angela realized that she couldn’t continue trying to be an upstanding citizen and a good friend to Darlene and Elliot, couldn’t keep jumping the line between good and bad (maybe those words needed redefining too) on a whim. Time to pick a side.

So when Tyrell Wellick called her with tears in his voice she was calm, much calmer than she’d felt in a long time.

“I love him,” he’d sobbed, and he _did_ , Tyrell loved Elliot beyond words in a deeper, more complicated form than Angela’s familial love.

“I do too,” she’d replied quietly, truthfully, while Tyrell cried on the other end of the line.

Angela had lost before. She’d asked Elliot to let her lose and lose she had, but Elliot would not be lost to her too. She needed to be there when he woke up to see to that personally.

She turned off the lights and closed the door quietly behind her. She would lose no more.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought it necessary to look at Angela's character in both seasons, not just the second one, because she has been through a lot and come a long way for it.
> 
> I hope the requester feels I've done their prompt justice!


End file.
